CFP: [20th] Potentiality and the Unfinished States of Literature (3/20/08; MLA '08)

CFP: â€œPotentiality and the Unfinished States of Literatureâ€A Panel of the MLA Graduate Student Caucus, MLA 2008

The Graduate Student Caucus, an affiliate organization of the MLA, is pleased to invite currentgraduate students to submit proposals for twenty-minute papers for a panel discussion titledâ€œPotentiality and the Unfinished States of Literatureâ€ at the 2008 MLA annual meeting, 12/27-12/30 in San Francisco. This panel will investigate â€œpotentialityâ€ as a means of thinking theconditions of possibility of literature in all of its habits and guises.

Responding to Walter Benjaminâ€™s call for the task of criticism to â€œread what was never written,â€we will consider how we might approach a text, genre or material form as an inhabitant of anâ€œunfinished state,â€ containing potential that is saved or conserved in actuality, or that is latent,submerged, repressed, banned, or otherwise not fulfilled in its moment of production. The panelwill ask how narrative, poetic, or dramatic injunctions travel, become recessed, or remainsuspended to be addressed at another time, in another place, or under another sign. FollowingGiorgio Agamben in The Idea of Prose, we will also think reflexively about how the realm ofstudy is itself the domain of potentiality, and the work of scholarship the labor of leaving thework â€œunfinished.â€

We are interested in papers that reflect on what it means to think of literature in its manymaterial productions and disciplinary formations as potential, as having the capacity to be takenup elsewhere.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words via email by March 20 toagarrison_at_ucdavis.edu with â€œMLA Panel Submissionâ€ in the subject. Questions? Please contactAlysia Garrison in the English Department at the University of California, Davis.